You Can’t Manage Deer By the Mouthful

The key to buck management in a QDM program is setting reasonable harvest criteria based on age – and then having the patience and fortitude to restrain yourself from taking younger bucks. Many hunters who don’t have the patience or fortitude look for loopholes that will allow them to take any buck they want and still believe they are doing QDM. If their favorite loophole is discredited, they tend to look for another.

Whenever I discredit the “G-word” loophole, for example, I often hear responses like this:

“Okay, so I can’t manage [the G-word]. But if I see a buck that isn’t going to amount to anything, removing him will free up nutritional resources for better bucks.”

If this is true where you hunt, then you are hunting one crappy piece of dirt.

When Food Plots Fail

I’m looking at what’s known – in the parlance of our times – as an “epic fail.”

The soybeans are long gone. The sorghum survived the driest weeks of May and early June, but while it struggled, crabgrass rose up to engulf the scene like a noxious tide.

This wreckage called a food plot got off to such a great start, too. Back in April, soil temperatures and moisture allowed for timely planting. Natural forages were abundant, providing a buffer to protect the new soybean seedlings from premature browsing. The blend of soybeans and sorghum appeared likely to sail ahead of any weed competition and shade it out.

What went wrong?

Get a Sneak Preview of Mast Crops Now

If you’re like me, you’re already thinking about stand sites for the coming hunting season, and you may have even hung a few stands already. Several factors weigh on our decisions about stand placement, and a key factor most of us consider every year is the strength of the acorn crop – and which trees are having the best year. When I can find a white oak with a heavy crop – especially in a year when the acorn crop is moderate or weak on average – I know I have found a site for a bowhunting stand that could be dynamite.

The trouble is, oak mast can be difficult to scout until close to hunting season. Acorns grow slowly throughout most of their development, gaining size more rapidly in the last few weeks. Before this point in late August and into early September, spotting acorns and evaluating crop size in the high limbs of mature oaks can be very difficult, even with very good binoculars.

Luckily, there’s a way to cheat and get an early glimpse of mast production – and it does not involve climbing trees.

Clear Skies, Thirsty Food Plots

It would have been too simple if my soybean plots were looking great. If all the factors I outlined in my last blog post had come together well and I had a beautiful, lush stand of soybeans, you would think this is really very easy, wouldn’t you? And we wouldn’t want that, would we? Well, fear not. We avoided that catastrophe. If you look at my plots today, you see a perfect example of what can go wrong.

Eight Ways to Protect Soybeans from Deer

Every spring I find myself in an ironic frame of mind: I am hoping deer will stay out of the food plots at QDMA Headquarters. If you’ve ever tried to grow soybeans, cowpeas or other warm-season legumes and saw them annihilated within a couple weeks of breaking through the dirt, you know what I’m talking about. It may be a futile exercise, but this year I’m trying again to grow soybeans at the QDMA property, and I’m trying every trick in the book to get them established.

Using a Forestry Mulcher to Create Deer Cover

A visitor who read my Empty Rooms post asked a great question about forestry mulchers:

“Lindsay, what is your opinion of using those tree-mulching machines to create cover/bedding areas of 1/4 to 1/2 acres in scattered locations? Great website! Thanks, Clemente.”

I’ve had opportunities to see forestry mulchers in action and see the results. It is amazing how fast they can tackle brush, saplings, even fairly large trees, and reduce them all to toothpicks in no time, covering a large area fast. They create clean openings and leave behind a nice bed of mulch on the forest floor, so soil erosion is not a problem with this kind of disturbance (that makes them ideal for use on steep slopes or adjacent to streamside management zones). They would be useful for creating new food plots, clearing trails or new woods roads, opening firebreaks, or cleaning up shooting-lanes. I can also see a great value for tackling heavy, solid stands of invasive species, like mature privet or autumn olive; the mulcher knocks down the dense trunks and stems, and you apply herbicide to kill the root sprouts when they appear. I’m sure I’m leaving out many other possibilities.

QDM Troubleshooting: Avoid the Road-Trip Fantasy

When hunters say they tried Quality Deer Management (QDM) and found it doesn’t work, you can usually listen to each story and find the real problem. There are a handful of common story-lines I hear, and one of these is the Road-Trip Fantasy. It goes like this:

Hunter travels to _____ (insert name of state known for outstanding whitetails) to hunt with an outfitter. Hunter is blown away by the number and quality of bucks he sees. Hunter notices that the outfitter protects immature bucks, provides quality food plots, harvests does, or conducts other practices associated with QDM. Hunter returns home burning with excitement to launch his own QDM program and have hunting like they have in ______. Three or four years later, hunter says “QDM doesn’t work” because number and quality of bucks where he hunts is nothing like he saw in _______.

In this story, QDM did not fail. The problem is the hunter’s unrealistic expectations, one of the most common killers of QDM enthusiasm.

Sharpening Your Trail-Camera Skills in the Off-Season

Trail-cameras are a great tool for scouting, hunting and managing whitetails, but as an amateur photographer, I don’t like my cameras to be idle. I want to be photographing something. So, since it’s spring, and bucks don’t have antlers, and the warm-season food plots haven’t come up yet, I decided to get creative and try to capture deer in an unusual or scenic location. I started with the waterfall on the creek at QDMA Headquarters in Georgia.

Capturing deer in the same frame with the waterfall ended up being more difficult than I thought, but the process has been a learning experience. I’ve sharpened my understanding of my trail-camera’s detection zone, flash range, and other abilities – knowledge that will come in handy later in the year when I’m back running trail-camera surveys or investigating deer travel patterns. So, if your trail-cameras are collecting dust as they await the approach of fall, I suggest you get them back in the woods this spring and try something creative – such as a scenic backdrop or capturing an unusual species of animal you’ve never photographed before. You’ll hone your skills with trail-cameras in the process, and you might capture some very cool images. 

Don’t Get Burned by Fireblight

A southern crabapple planted at QDMA Headquarters in Georgia was one of those uncommon trees that blows past all of its sister seedlings planted the same year – rocketing upwards in height, spreading a beautiful crown of limbs, and throwing an incredibly dense spray of flowers and fruit at only three years of age. So I nearly shed tears last spring when I had to take my shears in hand and hack away nearly half of the tree’s perfectly shaped crown, including piles of immature fruit.

Hinge-Cutting Tips, Part 2: Hinge Height

Before we discuss the best height for a hinge-cut, study the trail-camera photo above. This adult doe is standing beneath a “dome” of cover created naturally by an over-arching privet shrub. Deer regularly bed in the shady hideout beneath this shrub, so I set up a trail-camera to get this shot. The important thing to note about this photo: The doe has plenty of head-room here, but I don’t. I can’t stand up under this shrub. In fact, to get in here and look for signs of deer use, I had to crawl on hands and knees. With that in mind, let’s talk about hinge-cutting height.

Hinge-Cutting Tips: Part 1

Hinge-cutting refers to chainsawing halfway through a tree at about waist height and pushing the tree over so that it falls but remains connected to the stump through the “hinge” you didn’t cut. The tree survives for a few years, creating ground-level cover for deer; and, if it’s a species deer will browse, like maple, tulip poplar, and others, you also increase ground-level forage. This is a great way to turn otherwise low-value trees to a productive use. Strategic hinge-cutting can create bedding areas, thicken or screen sanctuaries, screen the edges of food plots or hunter-access routes, block trails or other travel routes to manipulate deer movements to favor hunting, and more.

Here are a few guidelines I’ve accumulated from time spent making hinge-cuts.

Four QDM Lessons I Learned From Sawtooth Oaks

I learned priceless lessons about Quality Deer Management from sawtooth oak trees.

Sawtooth oak is a native of Asia that was introduced to North America in the 1920s. It was little known to hunters until the 1960s and 70s, when wildlife researchers began reporting the results of their use of the tree as a wildlife planting in the Southeast. Wildlife professionals began to talk to landowners and land managers about the tree’s features – fast growth, early acorn production, consistent and abundant crops, and high preference by deer. Nurseries began to produce seedlings, and hunters began planting them. My Dad was among them. Each winter starting about 1980 he ordered bags full of tree seedlings and presented them to my brother Rans and me, along with post-hole diggers, plastic tree tubes, and other tools we needed. Not even teenagers yet, Rans and I dreaded seeing those bags of seedlings show up, and as we trudged off to do the work, we grumbled about how those dinky seedlings were never going to do any good for deer. We no longer grumble as we climb into stands with our bows each season to hunt the travel patterns that center on those trees we planted (Of course, after we grew up and left home, Dad bought a PTO-driven auger to replace the post-hole diggers!).

True to what we heard, the sawtooths grew fast, started producing acorns at an early age, and consistently produce amazing acorn crops. But we also learned other traits that weren’t advertised.

Putting the Smackdown on Bradford Pears

Few things give me more pleasure than killing Bradford pears with a chainsaw. I love to kill any invasive plants, but Bradford pears are a favorite victim. They are ugly, squatty trees, their flowers stink, they produce worthless little chinaberry-size pears that deer don’t eat but birds scatter to the four winds, and they are escaping in massive numbers from suburban yards. If you discover this alien invading your wildlife habitat, put the smackdown on it immediately.

Crimes Against Fawns

Taking a walk at the QDMA National Headquarters last year, I found the scene of a crime. A tiny collection of bone fragments was all that remained of a fawn’s head. The jawbones were really all that hadn’t been crushed by whatever it was that left these scraps. This fawn had the three temporary pre-molars that fawns bring to this world, and the fourth tooth was just emerging, indicating it was about one month old or younger when it was killed. Ironically, the remains were surrounded by a large patch of excellent fawning cover: dense briars and broomsedge.

Fishing for Deer Data

For a starving graduate student tracking deer home ranges and movements, it’s a sickening moment: The GPS tracking collar on one of the bucks is no longer in motion, and the deer is apparently dead. But the sick feeling gets much worse when the student traces the signal of the motionless collar to the bank of a muddy lake.

Why would a GPS tracking collar end up at the bottom of a lake?

That’s where the poacher tossed it.